Stanford University

Position Title/Short Description

Full Text of JOE Listing:

Experiments Post-doctoral fellow job opening at Stanford GSB

The Golub Capital Social Impact Lab has a 2-year post-doctoral fellowship opening, working with Professor Susan Athey and other faculty affiliates of the lab. The lab’s research is focused on improving the effectiveness of social impact organizations, particularly in the domains of education, charitable giving, health, government services, worker training, and financial health.

The ideal candidate will have conducted behavioral/experimental research and have experience working conducting field experiments. Exposure to research relating to charitable giving research would be beneficial, but candidates with other specialities or backgrounds will be considered.

The position involves:

Developing and working on research projects using advanced experimental design and other causal inference techniques
Serving as project manager and collaborator on research projects, as a coauthor on some projects and as an assisting researcher on others
Interfacing with industry partners and
Supervising research assistants at various levels of seniority.

The ideal candidate is either preparing for an academic position in a field closely aligned with the lab, for which collaboration on the lab’s projects would serve as strong preparation, or an industry position, ie., in a technology company. This position does not incorporate independent research by the fellow outside the scope of the lab.

Depending on the fellow’s skills and interests, the fellowship will allow the opportunity to: create novel experimental designs, including adaptive and dynamic treatment regimes, bandits, and contextual bandits; run experiments in collaboration with technology firms or on tech firm platforms; use and develop cutting edge methodology for working with large data sets, using university infrastructure or the infrastructure of tech firms, including tools of machine learning and causal inference; develop coding expertise for publicly released software; and/or develop expertise in managing large-scale empirical projects with large code bases written by teams.

The postdoc will be responsible for:

Training and managing student research assistants; including ensuring continuity over projects on which multiple research assistants might work on across time.
Planning, organizing, and overseeing research projects; including identifying promising research areas, ensuring good progress on projects, and securing all necessary data, research assistants and software to conduct research.
Contributing to website content and course material relating to research projects; including writing about work to engage advanced student, funder and partner audiences.
Managing relationships with external (non-academic) partners such as tech companies and nonprofits; including coordinating meetings and workflow with external partners and selecting external partners and projects to collaborate on.
Contributing to funding applications and IRB approvals.

The strongest applicants will have a variety of skills and preparation, and a strong desire to rapidly obtain any skills and experience that are lacking. Desirable skills and experience include:

PhD (completed by start of employment) in economics, business or management disciplines, statistics, decision sciences, political science, psychology, marketing, experimental philosophy, or any other relevant scientific discipline or related fields, with deep expertise relevant to at least some of the problems and methods described above
Training in behavioral science research methods
Excellent coding skills and experience with statistical software in multiple languages (R & Python are used regularly)
Experience with econometrics, modeling and/or programming
Experience with large datasets
Experience with designing, implementing and analyzing experiments
Experience using cloud computing services such as AWS, Azure, etc.
Experience with Github or similar tools for collaboration and version control
Experience in interdisciplinary research, working in collaborative teams and managing research assistants
Excellent organizational skills, including the ability to set goals, track progress, and prioritize to meet deadlines
Strong communication skills